The Second Chair (13 page)

“Yeah, I am pissed off.”

“You mean me chasing off that married dweeb?”

“His name is Wayne.”

“Oh, excuse me, Wayne. Maybe you didn’t hear me, but I just offered to buy him a beer. That’s not chasing him off.”

“You chased him off. You ever think about what if I liked him?”

“It never crosssed my mind. Did you like him?”

“I didn’t
not
like him. He seemed nice enough.”

“Very strong. If he meant that much to you, I really am sorry I ruined your night.”

“You didn’t ruin my night and that’s not the point anyway. The point is it’s my life and it’s got nothing to do with you.”

Brandt put a hand to his chest. “And I would be the last to deny it. But all the books say you don’t want to get involved with a married guy.”

“Jesus, Jason, he bought me a drink, that’s all. That’s not exactly involved.”

“It’s not exactly uninterested either. Did he let his hand, however casually, fall and rest upon any part of your body?”

“My shoulder. One second, leaning over to pay Cecil. That was all.”

“I’m sure. But you notice I managed to pay Cecil already without touching anybody. Did he tell you you looked good?”

“Yes, he did.” Finally, beginning to be worn down, she broke a small smile. “He said I was too pretty to be a lawyer.”

“I love that. Like what, they have an ugly contest to get into law school?”

“I know,” she said. “But guys say it all the time. Like it’s a compliment. Wow, imagine that, a woman with enough brains to be an attorney and yet not a total scag.”

“Not even half a scag, in your case. Not trying to kiss up or anything.”

“No. Calling me half a scag is not kissing up.”

“Okay, you’re way less than even half a scag. You planning to have another drink?”

“You buying?”

“One. If you promise not to touch me.”

“You’re safe,” she said.

7

F
or eighteen hundred dollars a month, Wu rented a twenty-by-thirty-foot studio apartment on the top floor of a large building on Fillmore Street, north of Lombard. The unit was essentially one large, high-ceilinged room, with a small but functional open kitchen, a tiny toilet and shower-only bathroom in the back corner, a decent clothes closet. The futon she slept on converted into a sofa during the day. She also had an old upholstered reading chair next to an end table where she kept her magazines. The only really nice pieces of furniture, aside from a relatively new, high-tech television set, were a Japanese changing screen and a cherry dining table that her father had bought her when she passed the bar. More often than not this doubled as her work desk.

The best thing about the apartment, and the reason for the ridiculous rent, was the windows—two oversized ones along the Fillmore wall, and another couple over the sink and counter in the kitchen area. From their vantage four stories up, all of these afforded really nice views of Marina Park, with the Golden Gate Bridge off to the left, Marin County just a swan dive and a long swim away.

The built-in bookshelves on the opposite wall were filled to bursting with her CDs and law books and a wide selection of hardbacks, mostly nonfiction—history, biography, political science—but one shelf of novels. A bright multicolored eight-by-ten rug covered most of the hardwood. She kept the place neatly organized and very clean.

Now, wrapped in a heavy turkish nightgown, she sat at her table with her briefcase open and her third cup of morning coffee in front of her. The sun, just up, came in over the sink windows and sprayed the wall to her left. She’d been awake for forty-five minutes, had taken the hottest shower she could stand and gulped down four aspirins. She’d eaten a banana, half a canteloupe, and then three eggs scrambled up with soy and leftover rice. Two cups—not demitasses, but her old cracked mug—of espresso. The throbbing in her head was getting to the manageable state, she thought, but still she hesitated before opening the folder she’d just taken from her briefcase. She had picked it up—newly transcribed interviews, more discovery—from Boscacci.

Last night she’d never gotten to them. Instead, like almost every other night for the past few months, she had gone out to find a party. For a moment there, in the dead of the night with Jason Brandt, it had almost seemed as though it would turn out to be more than that. But by the time the alarm went off, he had gone.

Just as well, she had told herself after the initial stab of realization that he’d left. Probably just as well.

Now that she’d committed her client to admitting the petition against him, she had a long moment of terror imagining that she’d find something among this latest evidence indicating that Andrew had not in fact murdered his teacher and his girlfriend. She didn’t believe it was likely, but Dismas Hardy’s reaction had brought home to her the seriousness of the situation. She’d leveraged not just herself and her client, but the reputation of the firm.

If she didn’t deliver, it would be bad.

Finally, she reached into her briefcase for the folder, pulled it out and set it in front of her, then opened it.

She sat with Hal and Linda at the dining room table again. No sign of the maid this time. The house was almost eerily quiet to Wu after she’d finished acquainting the Norths with the most recent developments in the case. She needn’t have worried about finding exonerating evidence. The new discovery was, if anything, more damning than what they’d seen so far—the testimony of Andrew’s best friend, motives, more about the gun. Tension between the couple was thick but transparent, and to break it, Wu had asked if there was anything else about Andrew that she might need to know.

“You already know about the joyride,” Linda said.

“No,” Wu replied. “I mean before that. Did Andrew have any kind of history of misbehavior or violence? Anything like that?”

“No,” Linda said. “Nothing serious.”

Hal North cleared his throat. “Well . . .”

“I said nothing
serious,
” Linda snapped. “I didn’t say nothing at all. Don’t give me that look, Hal. I’m not trying to hide anything.”

“I’m not giving you a look. We just disagree about what was serious or not.”

“Maybe it would be better,” Wu interjected, “if you just told me everything and let me decide whether it seems important now or not. I gather there were a few incidents.”

“Years ago,” Linda said. “Literally, when Hal and I were first together.”

“What happened?” Wu asked.

Linda drew a labored sigh. “All right. The one, it was when I told him that Hal and I were getting married. I remember it was a Saturday afternoon, a nice sunny, warm day, and we had the windows open in the kitchen. Andrew was about ten, and still at the age where he liked to sit on my lap, you know?” She sighed again. “Anyway, Alicia—our daughter, Hal’s daughter, really—she was there, too, so we could all share the good news.” She stopped.

“And what happened?” Wu prompted her.

Linda’s lips were pressed tightly together as she fought for control. “He just . . . He just lost his temper.”

“Did he hit you?”

When it became obvious that Linda couldn’t or wouldn’t answer, Hal took over. “He hit her, me, Alicia. He went over to the sink and started throwing the dishes at us. I took a couple of stitches in the face stopping him.” He touched a still-visible scar along his jaw, let out a deep breath. “It wasn’t pretty.”

“But that was seven years ago,” Linda said. “And it was my fault anyway. I think I must have just been a terrible mother.”

“You are not.”

“But I was, before you. You weren’t there.” Linda turned to Wu. “You should know all this. Andrew’s father walked out on us both when he was three, and I needed to work, so I became a waitress, then later a hostess.”

“You know Beaulieu?” Hal interrupted with real pride, pointed at his wife. “Hostess at Beaulieu.”

This was one of the city’s premier dinner destinations, and a magnet for the power elite. Wu wasn’t surprised that Linda Bartlett—beautiful, witty, and sophisticated—had wound up with a highly visible job there.

But this was ancient history to Linda, and she waved off her husband’s intended flattery. “Anyway, I was young and selfish and liked to have a good time. I admit it, though I’m not proud of it. I had . . . opportunities come my way and I wanted to take advantage of them. Anyway, most of the opportunities came with men attached—it’s okay, Hal, she probably needs to know this. It’s not like a state secret anyway.” Linda sighed and continued. “In any event, the men I saw often weren’t so nice to Andrew. And I didn’t have the strength or understanding or simple will to do much about it. So he came to hate the idea of my boyfriends.” She reached out a hand to her husband. “Including Hal, I’m afraid. At first, at least.”

“He still simmers,” Hal said. “Maybe not at me, specifically . . .”

But Linda remained defensive. “It’s just that he’s got this mistrust. He has trouble believing in people in general. And that’s me, too, my fault. In the early years, I was so bitter and mad at being dumped, at the unfairness of the way my life had turned out, I just wanted to make up for lost time, and I took it whenever I got a chance. Andrew couldn’t count on me. So he’s always expecting to be betrayed or abandoned or let down.”

“Still?” Wu asked.

“To some degree,” Linda admitted.

“Though Kevin has helped,” Hal added.

“Kevin?”

“Kevin Brolin,” Linda said. “He’s a psychologist who’s been seeing Andrew.”

“For how long?”

“All this time,” Hal said. “On and off. He’s an anger management specialist.”

Fantastic, Wu thought. A jury would love to hear about all these anger issues. But she had to press on. Knowledge was power, and she needed all she could get. “Mrs. North, when you started to tell me about the day you and Hal announced your engagement, you made it sound like Andrew’s tantrum was the first of at least a couple of incidents.”

Linda looked to Hal, who nodded and said, “Alicia’s party?” He went on. “This was maybe three years ago, Alicia’s twelfth or thirteenth birthday party. She invited five or six kids, and we made her include Andrew.”

“They’re only a year apart,” Linda said.

“Anyway,” Hal went on, “all the girls got into some PlayStation thing and evidently they all decided to gang up to beat Andrew.” He shrugged. “I came home to a smashed big-screen, pieces of remote all over the place. Alicia’s lip was cut, her eye . . .”

Linda came to her son’s defense. “He’s really passionate about video games. That’s normal enough nowadays. But he also reads, and writes beautifully. He’s getting solid B-pluses at Sutro, and you already know he’d gotten the lead in the play.”

Hal’s whole body seemed to slump. His voice was deep, depressed. Obviously he and Linda’s respective spin on Andrew’s character traits was a festering wound, and now here in front of the boy’s attorney, its binding was unraveling. He looked directly at Wu. “He never laughs. The boy’s just not happy in his skin. He hates all team sports. He’s changed his haircut and color ten times in two years. He wears torn T-shirts with butt-crack shorts and combat boots.” The slab of Hal’s face was a monolith of sadness.

Persistent, nearly pleading to Wu, Linda started again. “He can play any musical instrument with strings on it.”

“But won’t ever perform for anyone, or take lessons.”

Wu had to call a stop to it. “I think I get the picture,” she said. She sat perfectly still with her hands linked on the table in front of her. The Norths were avoiding eye contact with each other, although Hal caught Wu’s gaze for a brief instant and rolled his eyes. Finally, choosing her words with great care, Wu started to speak. “This issue we’ve got to deal with here is the likelihood of what a jury in an adult trial is going to do when confronted with the facts of this case. The negative character issues we can avoid as long as we don’t bring up anything positive.”

“What?” Linda asked. “What does that mean?”

“It’s just a rule,” Wu said. “Character can’t be used by the prosecution except if we bring it up first. After that it’s open season. Do you think we want to go there, Mrs. North?”

It took her a minute, but she finally shook her head. “I don’t think that would be a good idea.”

It was the first time that Linda had acknowledged the basic problem: that regardless of the facts, the situation
looked
bad for her son. Wu played to that card. “No, I don’t think so, either. And that leads me to the really crucial question.” A quick glance at Hal, who nodded encouragement. “From what we’ve seen of the discovery so far—and this means the whole gun question, the pattern of lies to the police, the eyewitness testimony, and so on—do you really think, Mrs. North, we should advise Andrew to run the risk of an adult trial, or try to talk him out of it if he decides to admit?”

Hal reached over and put his hand over his wife’s. “It comes down to how it
looks,
hon. What a jury will probably do with the evidence they see.”

Linda sat with it for a long time. Finally, she looked first to Hal, then to Wu. “You don’t think it’s possible that he actually did do this, do you?”

Wu finessed her answer. “I think that eight years is a far, far better sentence than anything he’d be likely to get in an adult trial. There are no other suspects, Mrs. North. Andrew was the only person that we know was there when the murders happened, and he had a gun and a motive.”

Another silence.

“Maybe we should let Andrew decide,” Hal’s voice was a whisper.

This, of course, had been Wu’s goal all along. When Andrew got acquainted with the next round of discovery, which she intended to show him today, Wu believed that he would be a fool to deny the hopelessness of his position, and she did not think him a fool. He would opt to admit. With his mother opposed to that idea, though, urging him to fight for his innocence every step of the way, he was much less likely to come to this obviously correct decision. But if Linda could be convinced not to object, Wu would have a clear field, and convincing her client would be that much easier.